Don't Ditch the Manuscript

            I recently read in some article that if what you are writing isn’t "fun" anymore, than you should move onto something else. I tend to disagree. That was just one writer’s process. There are too many processes to pin down and give just one edict on writing and manuscripts. The “hate” phase I just got out of was ESSENTIAL for me. It caused me to go back and read a stack of Writer’s Digests, Poets and Writers and to read about a hundred beginnings to memoirs. This last “hate fest” actually motivated me to do research and find what the heck it was that I did hate.

            That’s the thing, often we don’t know what is frustrating us, only that something looms over our monitor and tells us that we’re doing something wrong. I’ll read a passage I was writing and ask myself, “Why don’t I like this?” and I won’t know the answer. This past time, it came down to coherence. That the details I chose to include did not add to the overall goal of the chapter. But it isn’t always that way. And to say that if writing isn’t “fun” you may need to ditch the manuscript is a little short sighted.

            Writers are creators and can change any manuscript to be the one that works. I always come back to Frank O’Hara’s poem:

Why I Am Not A Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

Frank O'Hara

            You can start out with the thought placement, put the orange out there and yet the orange becomes a baseball, and then the baseball becomes the soccer ball you found in an alleyway. That’s what’s so wonderful about our job here. Nothing is written in stone, literally. Your manuscript is valuable at all stages of the game, whether you happen to hate where it’s going right now or whether you love the sardines you just wrote into it. Your manuscript is worthy because it’s your process. Honor it whether you hate it or love it.

The Writing Life - How hard is it?

          

  Recently, someone asked me how hard it was to create a writing life. I have answered this question before, early on in my undergrad where all my writing professors tried to veer us away from writing with the poor success rate statistics and tried to convince us all that we will only face discouragement and refusals to one day get a single poem accepted. As a young, fearless soul full of spite and malice, this fueled my fire. I used to say back to them, “Why not try?” They never mentioned some other things that I now know are the results of writing a novel length manuscript or re-writing a column eleven times.

            Refusal. Some of my writing life’s fallout is definitely steeped in refusal slips, both email and physical. But worse, I have to learn to rebound every single time I receive one. This process never smoothes out for me. I seem to always put all my little eggs in every Literary Journal’s basket. Sometimes, I send a piece out that I have re-written to a point I think is gleaming and when I receive it back at least five times, I know that something is broken and needs a little massage to get it back to submission status. Another re-write looms.

            Fat. I don’t move around enough. I try. I used to exercise one hour a day, but have since acquired a strange, mystery illness that renders me able to saunter at best. (I am waiting for that wondrous moment I find out what I have and it will be a small essay). I’m getting closer to the enigma, but it doesn’t help to be sedentary all day. Expect to move around a lot to counter-balance your slobbiness or, what other writers call dedication.

            Loneliness. I am alone all day long, writing in a vacuum. Most of the time I crave this state, where I can be left alone for hours to type away at my innermost fears, nightmares, and writerly demons. But there’s that burnout you get in any job. I need to interact with my species. Even if it’s a trip to the grocery store for Worcestershire sauce, it’ll pull me outward, and get me off my island.

            Faithlessness. I lose my writing faith. I get down on my own writing and hate it on the fifth through thirty-fifth rewrite. When I begin to hate something, I know I’m nearing the final draft. I also take a breather from it and start to work on something fun: something I just started writing and am still in the creative stages, where anything can happen. That’s my most favorite part of writing. I have to admit, publishing and editing are not my forte and don’t hold any excitement for me.

            Shopping. I hate looking for markets for my work because it gives me the heebie-jeebies trying to match myself to a literary journal. I picture the editors. Their prim pink suits and manicures, flipping through my messy self on the page, and finally typing out a nicely rounded and appreciative refusal slip. I know it’s a negative image, but there it is. I have to exhume it every time I submit. And I have a goal to submit to thirty journals a month. (Kate Gale said to whore yourself out like a guy at a bar). I average about seven a month right now. Egad.

            Reading. I read. A lot. I read Literary Journals I think match my style. I read ones that decidedly don’t match my style but are exciting and fresh. River Teeth. Fourth Genre. I aspire to match them. I also read any University’s review. Here’s Kate Gail’s press: Red Hen. I read the classics: Dickens, Maugham, and Dostoyevsky. I read the genre I’m writing: Memoir right now. Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Cunningham. Wild by Cheryl Strayed, I Want to be Left Behind by Brenda Peterson, Licking the Spoon by Candace Walsh, Everybody into the Pool by Beth Lisick, Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck, and more. Reading keeps your brain fresh and keeps the dialogue going in your head. (Recently, Phillip Roth said on NPR that he was relieved to give up this inner dialogue when he retired from writing.)

            There you have it. Some thoughts on the writing life’s struggles and tribulations. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It doesn’t necessarily mean “published.” It means that you’ve chosen every single word on the page and the piece sings to you. When it does that, after a walk in the woods or a lengthy stay away from your manuscript or piece, then put it to bed. Also, whore it around for a while. If it keeps being sent back, go on a drinking binge, or sleep for a few days. Then, go dig into it. Also, have a friend give you feedback. It’s not that far from being finished.

What I've Learned Recently

I thought I'd share some pointers that worked for me in my recent edits of my memoir. One of my favorite structure guys, James Scott Bell, always encourages conflict in every scene, so my loose goal in re-reading my manuscript was to make sure that I had at least one conflict per chapter.

What I found when I started looking for these conflicts was the following:

- It's better to have limited conflicts per chapter so the reader doesn't get confused. I realized that cohesion goes with this and the reader can go off the path easily.
- Within this conflict, it should relate to the common goal of the whole novel or memoir. If it doesn't relate in some way, it's superfluous (even if it's written really well).
- You can work in back story when you as the character or your character has a quiet moment or process. I wrote these segway phrases down from recent books I have been reading:
 "I had a sudden memory..."
 "One time this happened in particular..."
  "Years later I would see..."

You can go for one to three paragraphs into your flashback or flashforward but get back to your story for the chapter (or conflict) and do it with a reminder transition sentence for that paragraph.
For instance, if you were in a church where you were asked to get up and give a talk, you can flashback to an equally stressful event, but then bring it back with something like, "As I walked up to the pulpit, like all those years back, I lost my footing..."

Well, that's all I've got right now, but they've been serving me well in this re-write. I hope they will serve you.

Interviewed on Pubslush!

Hi all,
I was interviewed on Pubslush for Women on Wednesday. Please visit here: Pubslush.

I think I finally landed on the first sentence of my memoir. It's been brewing, in the back of my head. What it had to do was set the tone, introduce me and my mission or goal/struggle, and ask a story question that will only be half answered in each chapter until the end, when all is revealed.

I have been writing this memoir as a memoir since 2009. Before that, these were strings of stories I'd collected about my Mormon childhood and friends who saved me from myself along the way.

So, it's been about seven years. But at the Writer's Digest conference in 2009, I was shocked into revisions when I heard James Scott Bell's workshop about plot and story question. Yes, it was a sinking feeling that I'd done something terribly wrong, that I was suddenly plunged into that category: mediocre. But it wasn't and isn't true. I was just still engaged in the shitty first drafts.

Revising to include image, voice, place, character and theme has been another journey. I am lucky to have taught a workshop on these in storytelling and have learned so much through the process.

Thank you Sioux City and your generous writers!

Writing in a Closet

That's what we all do, right?  We sit and do what Roger Rosenblatt's grandson calls "doing nothing." Every day is invisible to the naked eye. Our husband walks into the room where we are doing nothing and asks, "Where'd you put my socks?" and  except for what our fingers might betray as an action, we turn and say, "I am not sure," because our mind is consumed by what is going on in front of us. It's a scene unfolding, a smattering of words that could look like a Rorshach test to the untrained eye.

So what do we have to show for this? While Engineers work on schematics, and Architects change the shape of a city, our hands, knuckles ugly with intent, indent keys and that is all. Until, we have a manuscript that looks vaguely like a book that most people have stopped purchasing or reading.

Bleak, right? I am not trying to be a Debbie Downer. I want to set the scene for this passage that has given me hope and has led me to the newest, fresh read of my manuscript that I've had in days.

Mary Karr's Liar's Club.

"The morning Mother decided to go back to Daddy, she and Grandma had a fight about whether her lipstick was too dark. Grandma had brought it up at breakfast and just clamped down on it like a Gila monster. Finally, Mother stuffed our new clothes in her dead father's Gladstone bag and piled us in the car in our pajamas again. Again the old woman had crimped her hair. Just before we pulled out, she poked her clamp-studded head in my window. Some curls had sprung loose from the clips, so she looked for all the world like the stone head of Medusa that Mother had shown us in her mythology book. The old lady called Lechfield a swamp, a suckhole, and the anus of the planet before Mother cranked up the engine. The too-sweet smell of Granma's hyacinth perfume hung in the car till Mother lit a Salem."

This passage is going to church for writers. Too dark lipstick. Dead father's Gladstone bag. Crimped her hair. Clamp-studded head. Medusa. Anus of the planet. Hyacinth and Salem. These are the voyages of the Starship: Writer. We must put all our eggs in these baskets. This is our hope. Make sure your descriptions propel plot and develop character, they say in writing class, but this is the "how" of that command.

If this doesn't shake you at your writing core, go back and read the poem namesake of my blog. Leaving the dishes.

In all of the dark nothing we push through everyday, let's also throw out these branches to one another, oh, writers, to remind us of the perfumed stories inside us.

7 Ways to Flesh Out a Scene

You've finally found a reading "pal," a person you trust who answers all the burning questions you have about your manuscript, a person who has also published a little or a lot, who takes the kind of consideration with your manuscript that it needs to be "polished." You've given her your manuscript and are twiddling your thumbs with nervous energy. A silent wish in the back of your head is that you are waiting to hear what every writer wants to hear about their manuscript but seldom does: "It's done. Send it out."
            Instead of this coveted sentence, you read that it’s time you put your nose back to that old, tired grindstone. Your pal has sent you your reviewed manuscript with Track Changes all over its scenes. You see written in red text, "Flesh this scene out."
            "What?  That scene's totally done," you think. Or, "That scene is so not important. Why do I have to 'flesh it out?'" When you finally sit down, after remorse, anger, plotting revenge on your dear friend and throwing darts at her picture, you realize she's right. The scene is abbreviated and you did more "telling" than "showing." Again. There's no way to avoid this earlier draft "tell" writing. Some writers are better than others at showing their characters’ actions and behaviors, but when your goal is to NaNoWriMo the heck out of a manuscript, telling becomes the rule, just to get it down.
            How do you get to all the "show?" You can look at all your "tell" markers and change them to “show,” but that’s assuming you have that kind of objectivity with your manuscript. Most of the time, you end up having your dear reader tell you where the “tells” are. Face it, telling is like breathing. We start to tell about our stories so they can come to life and like Flannery O'Connor quoted, we finally get to "know" what our story is.
            Great. So now you have the manuscript with red track changes through it and all these scenes to "flesh out. "Go deeper" you chant as you write and begin to accept a red track-changes note from your pal in your manuscript. Suddenly, your hands hover over your keyboard. You realize, you're lost. You honestly don't know what she means. What the @$*&()^&% is "fleshing out" anyway?
            Here's what I’ve found after throwing darts at my friend's picture and calming down enough to re-enter my manuscript for the three millionth time.

1. Don’t kill your friend. She’s only the messenger and she’s almost always right. Remember, she’s been published.
2. Get your muscle back. Chances are you are so sick and tired of this manuscript, you’d rather drop it off the edge of the Grand Canyon than “flesh out” even one of its scenes. Go to a passage of a past favorite book and type it out. One in the genre you are writing would help. While typing it, read it out loud. This will get you back into the “fresh zone,” where you’re actually trying on another author’s voice. (You may do this as much as you like to cultivate freshness. I like to type out Pam Houston. She never tells. It’s disgusting.)
3. Stop playing with your cat, checking email, or tweeting “fleshing out a scene now.” Avoid distractions and free write about the scene. Is there a central image in the scene? Ask yourself what that image looks like and make a list of descriptions. In my memoir, I asked myself to list ten unique things my mom does to get her behaviors nailed down.
4. Mine the guilt. Now that you have images in the scene or at least a list of random images, do any of them evoke a moment in time, a reaction, an admission? Did you feel guilt? How did that look? Was there envy there? How does envy look in a scene? Does it make your character tired? How does fatigue look?

            In J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey, Franny recounts a nightmare to her brother, Zooey. “‘Be quiet a second, or I'll forget it,’ Franny said. She stared avidly into space as nightmare recallers do. There were half circles under her eyes and other subtler signs that mark an acutely troubled young girl, but nonetheless no one could have missed seeing that she was a first class beauty.” Throughout Franny and Zooey, Franny’s mental breakdown is almost a character of its own. Why? Because Salinger makes every scene about it via descriptions such as “acutely troubled,” and “half circles” even amidst her beauty. Her fatigue and anxieties are key to her actions and reactions.

5. Go crazy. What does your character care about? You hear this question all the time, but sometimes you just don't know. So replace it with this question: Where did that crazy notion to write your novel come from? What was that raw emotion you felt, that indignation that pushed you to take on this challenge? Put it into your character's immediate goal. As she strives to analyze a nightmare to her brother, include actions that hint at your overall goal for her story. Write her behavior or actions attached to the behavior. In the example above, Salinger’s goal for Franny was for her to ultimately have a nervous breakdown to reflect collegiate society’s pressures on a delicate mind. Close study reveals he kept that goal in his own mind while writing every scene.
6. Find the lint. I have a big sign above my monitor that demands, “Is there lint?” Can my reader see lint on my character’s jacket if he’s a slob and that slobbiness gets him in trouble? If there’s no lint, maybe this isn’t a key scene. Is your character moving towards her desires in this scene or is she being pushed farther away from them? If the scene doesn’t connect to either of those things, cut and paste it into another document named cut from “…” (Replace “…” with the name of your manuscript, or your favorite nickname for it. “Novel from hell” might work.) Keep that document close in case you ultimately figure out why you wrote one of the scenes you cut and how it might move your character towards her goal. 
7. Go to the Grand Canyon, or Vegas, or for a walk. Leave your manuscript for a while. You know the current scene moves your character into further danger but you also know you need to add more to the scene, more description of behavior, more interaction, and more emotion. None of this is easy. If it has been in the past, count your lucky stars. Calm down, take a break, and allow some past experiences to creep into your psyche, to give your subconscious a chance to work out the puzzle before you get back to work.

Recently, I had to write about sex in the garden for Greenwoman magazine and my husband had been gone for four months. The early drafts of this article had no sex in them because my current life circumstances were directly impacting my writing. I had to mine the past and think back to a time I’d had sex. What made it good, I’d asked myself? What made it GREAT? This line of thinking brought back a memory of a lover breathing on my ear at a café in Germany. That detail changed the whole article.
            When your “telling” takes over a scene or an entire article or manuscript, don’t strangle your reader when she tells you to “flesh it out” or “go deeper.” Simply follow exercises outlined above and see if they help you understand what’s missing, and what your reader wants to see during her next reading of your wonderfully “fleshed out” manuscript. Then get to work. After you've thrown a few darts.

RIP Kutta Wutta

Kutta Wutta died this morning at 8:30 am. I had a terrible dream that a gangster got into our newly built house (which we don't have) and all of our animals chased him out, Pahsa, Kutta Wutta and Shmoody, and they all got killed in heavy traffic.

I guess this was pretty fast. Kutta Wutta (Althea) was creaky and cranky but nothing out of the usual. About two weeks ago it was harder for her to bend over to eat and she’d lose her balance. Then last week she was voracious, and couldn’t get out of the kitchen, wanting more food. She also peed wherever she was. This morning, I woke after the bad dream and went out to her. She was gasping huge intakes of breath and had vomited. I wiped the vomit and pet her and she’d twitch and then she’d tried to itch herself. After about five minutes of gasping, while I sobbed, she purred because she felt my hand petting her cheek. After that, she stopped breathing. Right before that, though, I had a thought in my head while I pet her and she gasped. I didn’t realize I had the thought until she purred. I wanted a communication that she knew I was there and she gave it to me. She felt my presence. She purred.

            I sobbed because I couldn’t make her feel more comfortable. I wished I had some dilaudid and some oxygen for her, but I had nothing to help her but a heating pad and my hand stroking her still soft cheek. I cut some of her hair and took the name tag off of her collar. I put them both in a ziplock bag. I will find a special box to put them in.

            I feel bad because I banned her from the beds since she’d started peeing randomly this summer. I feel bad because I didn’t pet her a lot because she often had pee or clumps of poo from the box in her nails. Her nail husks clung to the nail and never shed, so they were ingrown and near the end, I didn’t want to stress her out by clipping them. All stressors like clipping nails or brushing clumps from her hair made her pee.

            Right now I put her body in a blanket on the bed she coveted so much. The Humane Society of Sioux City is closed today. We have to hold onto her until they can cremate her for us. Cremate is such the wrong word for burning into ashes the essence of a person/being. There is nothing creamy about it.

            So we have a kitty wake for a day and a night, while, in death, she finally is comfortable on the bed, and comfortable from all the ills kidney disease caused to her little fur body. She put up with them in stride. Yesterday she jumped up on the couch. Yesterday - jumped! Today, dead. That’s how scrappy she was. Determined to be moving and acting as a cat, instead of riddled with pain and shut down.

            Matt bought Althea for me in our second year of dating. She was a birthday gift and lived in his apartment on Logan for over a year while we dated since my apartment didn’t allow cats. She was a pukey kitty, but vibrant and interested, always attacking a toy, but never people’s hands or feet like other cats (my male cat right now does this.) She exuded comfort when in warmth. When we moved into our house together, she sought sun and vents and hot rocks on which to repose. As she lay there, her eyes squinted in pure delight. Being around all that delight gave us joy, too. We’d comment, “We saved you from the kitty compound and now look at you, in the lap of luxury.” We called her Morganstern because she used to scratch at any papers you had in a bunch. Since we were students for the first five years of our lives together, there were plenty of those around. It looked to us like she was trying to gather them up and take them swiftly to work where a boss demanded, “Morgenstern, did you get the reports done?”

          We named her Althea after the Grateful Dead song. Later, we called her Kitty Witty. When we relaxed that, it became Kutta Wutta. The Hasidic Jewish pronunciation involved lots of phlegm. Matt decided she’d tired of this and we named her the standard deviation sign; the kitty otherwise known as Kutta Wutta.

The Alcott house was her hay day. She knew how to be comfortable and reflected its importance. Take a load off, she seemed to always say. Join me.

            We will miss our first cat together. The cat Matt almost took back because she puked on half a slipper as he slid his foot into the vomit. The cat we researched all food ingredients to realize she was corn intolerant. The cat we took from Logan to Alcott, from Denver to New York to Sioux City, the last move in the car where she used the box twice. She knew the drill.

           "There are things you can replace, and others you cannot.
The time has come to weigh those things." RIP, Kitta Witta.

No Compromises

This is the sixth time in a row I've gone off antibiotics to enter into pure illness. Flu-like symptoms with back pain and then, millions of stinging ants in my arms, torso, legs, neck, and my toes. I don't share this often, because there are too many out there who confess to their long diatribes of pseudo-illness of which I am not one.

When I'm well, I dance to Wee games, sing at the top of my lungs, play my clarinet, and work out for hours until I sweat, all while teaching online classes and trying to finish my memoir. Oh, and I keep two blogs, and this one exploits the tortured process of writing.

When I'm ill, I even ignore the pain for as long as I can. I hate to go to the doctor, and then when I finally go, they look concerned, do a random test, give me antibiotics, and I get well for a short while where I resume normal life.

I'm in the dumpy illness again, and this time it's keeping me in bed, lethargic and hardly functioning. But, I'm still writing, because without that I'd disappear. Much of my identity is derived from my fingers typing, and sentences forming.

My confession is actually to blatantly pound my chest and stomp up and down on my bed, "You will not defeat me. YOU WILL NOT DEFEAT ME!!!!!!"

I have a goal document, where I cut and pasted pictures of my goals and above it reads my slogan for the new year: NO COMPROMISES.

I've told a few people about my slogan and they ask, "What does that supposed to mean?" It means what you want it to mean. For me, it means I will succeed, regardless. It means to stay the course. It means that even in the face of pain, I must write and publish.

With that said, it also means to cave. I have to be meek for my illness, because, like I said before, too many of the fakes have gone before me and doctors are burned out. They're either overpaid and don't care, or they go back to the 1800s in their heads and since I have no visible signs of illness, besides a few white blood cells and a low grade fever, they look at me like I have the vapors. Time will tell with illness and I am trying to take this blast of pain with a new temperament. Wait for the tests to show the inevitable white blood cells, then call a few doctors and start asking questions.

Sometimes waiting is brave. Or stupid, but it's all I've got. And my slogan. The pictures stare back at me: This is who you are. This is who you are.

Writing will see me through.

Hiding Out in Sioux City

            I told Matt the other day that I drive and drive in Sioux City and the place I always end up at is Hyvee (the local grocery store). I guess I had an expectation that we were only here for a short time and that during that short time the city would change to accommodate my interests.  It was some subconscious wish I exhumed out of my brain. Since realizing this wish, Sioux City has still not changed for me and I’ve been here for two months. 

            When I had first arrived in Beacon, NY (our last two years on the road) I took off to Fishkill, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie (which I can spell by heart now) and sometimes up a ways to Rhinebeck. Of course I went into the city for the first three weeks in a row, until I ran out of money. I wrote in between.

            Sioux City is like Loveland, Colorado, but with no good Sushi. Its spindly and dark winter Cottonwoods line the dunes and the Missouri river and while the sun sets its always pink through the trees. It’s got a sparse beauty magnified by winter. The fanciest restaurants are Minerva’s (which we tried and thought was overpriced for okay food) and Jolene’s (I try not to match those names to a menial gas attendant job) and Chili’s which according to Anthony Bourdain, and we tend agree although we eat there still due to Sioux City’s slim-picking’s, calls the herpes of America. I won’t mention that I think we’re in the snack bonanza of America because I could go into too much detail, and the end result is a gut and poor circulation.  

            Juncos eat my birdfood I’ve hung out for other birds, trying to lure the secretive and elusive Cardinal. My cat gives me looks with raised eyebrows “for real?” So far, this is all Sioux City’s got for us, but I’m sure there’s more under the surface.

            Really, it doesn’t matter because I’m here to write. I measured my progress on my novel in New York one day as being about sixty to a hundred words an hour. That’s when I’m just generating, ignoring grammar and going at break neck speed to get the manuscript done. That’s not editing. I haven’t timed that, yet.

            Now, in Sioux City, I just figured out that I had six “done” (meaning “edited”) chapters and that to hit my 250 page target, I’d have to write 30 more chapters, 16 of which are written but not edited, 14 not at all written. With a page an hour and about four hours a day writing, that’s generating 2 and a half days per chapter, which turns out to be da da dada: 12 days. I have today through January 5th without a job, five of those days which are socially dedicated. It looks like I’ll be able to use about 8 days of my break to make a dent.  Realistic goal? 16 more chapters in shape.  Not done, just ready to edit.

            I want to finish this so that I can go full steam ahead on my 1930s Italian novel. That one makes my fingers itch to write. If anything, Sioux City will offer me time and seclusion to get ‘er done. Merry writing non-apocalyptic Christmas!

Schlocky McSchlockerson

Photo taken from http://www.peanutsoupdeluxe.com/2010/06/norman-rockwell.html

    

Recently, on a facebook chat with several writers, the topic I brought up was Schlock and how much of it I need to write before getting to gems.  The resounding answer was, "Tons!"  Some writers claimed to be Schlock queens and others told me we need to feed the Schlock to make him/her fat. Another screamed "Schlock party!" 

I thought about the content of my most recent schlock.  It was so syrupy, Santa Claus wouldn't read it to his own elves. There's a character who keeps emerging named Buster MgGhee.  He's permanently trapped in a Norman Rockwell scene.  Maybe he's standing in the background as the old-timey barber cuts the trapped-in reverie kid.  The biggest trait of Buster MgGhee is that he is the schlockiest narrator in the world and affects the Pepperidge Farm Remembers gravelly voiced, down-home, corn-bread eatin' attitude.  He'd write stuff like, "I remember when we all sat in front of the fire and unwrapped Christmas gifts, our mother baking a cobbler in the kitchen."   

Now, the real writer in me, after three pages of this kind of schlock rips the stylus off the bucolic record, and yes, it is now a ruined record, gets one good sentence out of it.  I have to look hard because Buster's voice still resounds in my brain.  He's persistent and cloying, cliché and ensnares me with cobbler at every turn.  "No, don't write that.  You need to take the reader's hand and lead them into the kitchen…to get a piece of cobbler."  After so much cobbler, I have to stop Buster from taking any life left in my memoir and smack him.  "I'm too fat, Buster.  No more cobbler!"

He's so wimpy he cries for the mad-capp Keystone cops who come hobbling side to side on their heels, twirling their batons to take me further into Schlocky kitchens, to force cobbler down my throat.  

"Stop," I cry.  "No more Schlock!"  I hear this schlocky stuff in my head often, and think it so genius at the time, like I channeled my inner Chabon.  When I go to write it down, however, I read back through and notice how I'm just telling a roomful of fifth graders about my life in long, telling sentences that sum up entire chapters' worth of stuff if I'd only open them into scenes.  Achhh. 

Buster.  I'm sorry.  I'm going on a diet.

image taken from http://www.artfire.com/ext/shop/product_view/cozyconcepts/3352173/cozyconcepts_keystone_cops_afghan_crochet_pattern_graph/design/patterns/crochet/blankets